With the recent release of the Samsung Galaxy S8+, all of you in the #BeastgripNation have been incredibly excited to see some sample footage and get our thoughts on its performance. TL;DR: the Galaxy S8+ works perfectly with the Beastgrip Pro and all of our gear! We also love shooting with it, which we'll explain in more detail below.

"The beauty of our products is that you can upgrade your phone whenever you want and always have a fully functional, professional rig ready to create with." - Vadym Chalenko, CEO

First Thoughts

We instantly fell in love with the S8+ modern, almost spaceship-like design. It feels great in your hands and has a perfectly-sized screen. Both the S8 and S8+ fit perfectly in the Beastgrip Pro straight out of the box too - no adjustment needed. The camera loads and focuses extremely fast and shoots beautiful footage (see sample videos/photos towards the end of the article). Below is a Facebook Live demonstration that explains our entire experience with the S8+ in more detail, but here are a few features worth mentioning right away:

Headphone jack (rejoice!)

Our one caveat with the iPhone 7/7 Plus is that it doesn't have a headphone jack. Without this tiny jack, you have to choose between keeping your battery pack connected or using a microphone, which is very cumbersome. The S8 lets you use both simultaneously.

Pro camera mode

The S8, like a lot of Android phones, has a special "pro" camera mode with tons of added controls, like white balance, shutter speed and focus. It's not as powerful as a third party app like FiLMiC Pro, but it provides a lot of extra functionality and is perfect for quick shots.

Image stabilization

We were really impressed with the image stabilization and how well it handled tiny vibrations/shakes when using our gimbal stabilizer and slider.

Focus tracking

You can lock your focus onto a specific object (or person) so your subject is in focus no matter where you move the phone. This is extremely helpful for shots with a lot of motion, such as with a gimbal or for vlogging.

Fast focus with the DOF Adapter and DOF Adapter MK2

The stock camera app instantly found its focus on both versions of the DOF Adapter. It still doesn't have the "flip the view" feature yet - so you have to shoot upside down or use an app like FiLMiC Pro - but we still use the stock camera app for quick photos or videos with the DOF Adapter, even though it's a little weird looking at our image upside down.

Long-lasting battery

After nearly 6 hours of continuous shooting, the battery was still at 40% the next day without charging overnight. Thumbs up for us!

It's also worth noting that we ran into a few small issues with the S8 when we recently shot our Kickstarter promo videos, such as the frame rate not saving in "pro" mode, FiLMiC Pro not allowing us to use all of the features, and the image stabilization setting. Check out our Facebook Live stream below for more details on the pros/cons of our first experience with the Galaxy S8+.

Sample footage with the Beastgrip Pro and Lenses

The moment you've all been waiting for - footage! The video and photos below were shot with the Pro Series bundle (available now). The first thing you'll notice is how sharp and wide the Galaxy S8+ footage looks with this lens. We designed our Pro Series lens with the legendary Japanese optics masters at Kenko Tokina for an uncompromising image quality demanded by high resolution smartphone cameras with 4K video - like the Samsung Galaxy S8 - with edge-to-edge sharpness, and zero chromatic aberration or distortion.

The sample footage that we shot is just beginning of what we're going to create with the S8. We're excited to put it to the test even more with long exposure night shots, 4K video, and with our Pro Series 1.33X Anamorphic lens prototype (as soon as we finish some final tweaks).

The stock camera on this phone is a 26mm equivalent focal length (a little wider than an iPhone) and with the Beastgrip x Kenko Pro Series .75X Wide Angle lens it becomes a 19.5mm equivalent focal length, which is super wide as you can see in the video and photos below.

The video and photos below were shot with our DOF Adapter MK2 prototype, which is launching on Kickstarter in the next few weeks. Notice how much depth of field the DOF MK2 adds to the already amazing camera on the S8.

Add your email here to be notified for our Early Bird Special as soon as the DOF Adapter MK2 launches on Kickstarter!

Conclusion

We love the Samsung Galaxy S8+. It's going to be a staple piece of gear in our setup for all future videos we create, especially when using a gimbal stabilizer or slider, and we're extremely excited to use it more. Stay tuned for more content and information about our Kickstarter campaign! BG

Footnotes

We also get a lot of inquiries about why we usually shoot with the iPhone, even though the Beastgrip Pro is compatible with most Android phones. The main reason is because of the apps. There are a LOT of iOS apps, like FiLMiC Pro, Filmakr, MAVIS, ProMovie, etc. that offer advanced functionality and work perfectly on all iPhones. When it comes to Android, even though the "pro" camera app on most phones is a powerful tool, you can't push your camera to it's fullest potential without the Anamorphic adapter, 35mm adapter or microphone settings, to name a few things. In addition, most apps like FiLMiC Pro have limited functionality on Android.

For example, on the One Plus One, One Plus Two and Samsung Galaxy S8+ phones that we own, we can't increase our frame rate to anything past 30 FPS or focus manually as close as we want when using FiLMiC Pro. As an Android developer, it's probably impossible to keep perfect functionality with so many different phone models, each with their own unique hardware, but it's a huge factor for us when it comes to the Android ecosystem.